As the field of optical communications has grown, new applications have pushed the limits of associated technologies beyond the capabilities that were available just a few short years ago. One of these new applications is the use of optical switches to interconnect numerous subscribers without transforming the optical signal into an electrical signal. Suggested optical switch architectures include the relatively elementary crossbar architecture and more sophisticated architectures such as the banyon, Benes, Clos and shuffle architectures. Two significant limitations which must be considered in evaluating these various architectures are crosstalk and loss. The crosstalk limitation may be alleviated by implementing various "dilated" versions of the above architectures, all of which are well known in the art. However, the problem of loss still looms large. Deleterious loss may be associated with any one of a number of different phenomena. However, the losses associated with intersecting optical waveguides, which may be used in the aforementioned switch architectures, is of special concern because that loss will be a function of the number of intersections encountered in a particularly selected path, and therefore will vary with path. To this extent, the losses associated with optical intersections are currently the most troublesome in the effort to develop and commercialize large optical switch designs.